Back in the day, major news sites like the BBC ran ads that were infected with malware that then infected computers. These weren’t shady sites like people expect you to get viruses from.
Installed an ad blocker the day that news broke and never looked back. Ads are potentially harmful to your devices.
I remember that, thousands of people got keyloggers and their accounts compromised. Then Blizzard tried to blame those people for getting infected, from the Blizzard website.
That shitty Epoch Times used to do that. I was watching a bunch of satire videos and one of their commercials was on, and I legitimately thought it was part of the skit because of how stupid it was.
Then it hit me it is a real ad. And real people are watching it. And that’s how I got radicalized even more.
I was fine with unobtrusive ads, I was fine with a minute of ads before a YouTube video. But it got so bad it was constantly interrupting everything. Also want to know what’s extremely unpleasant? Political ads calling for a moral panic against you or taking bigotry against you as a general assumption. I’m not watching that bullshit. My life is better without ads
I was excited for Brave when they talked about service privacy-friendly ads and sharing revenue with sites. That obviously didn't happen, but I think it is a good idea in general.
I don't mind privacy-respecting ads like sponsorships and whatnot in videos, but I absolutely cannot stand the data-harvesting ads used almost everywhere, as well as ads in services I've paid for.
There's a Dutch tech website called tweakers.net, a while ago they removed all tracking cookies and all ads are now just banners based on the current web page. I have adblocker disabled for that website and I'm happy with that
The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of "experienced programmers" don't have an ad blocker. I'm not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.
"experienced programmers" in would have web developers fall under that umbrella, I'd guess web developers are less likely to adopt adblockers if their livelihood depends on them
There's a surprising amount of programmers that don't know basics of various parts of an operating system. I know people that know several languages, but get lost on installing a mod pack for a game or installing an app from within another app like a browser.
The engineer who sat next to me at my old job didn't use an adblocker. She also would just ignore anything on the screen that wasn't directly related to her task. There'd be "please update" OS popups or "do you want to install a plugin for markdown?" ide prompts on her screen for days. When I'd roll over to work on something at her desk I'd be like "how do you work like this?" she was like "like what?"
She was pretty good at engineering and generally smart. I don't know how she did it.
20 years pro experience here: I run several different browsers in various states of blockedness for various reasons. But when I'm off the clock, of course, it's firefox with ublock.
Getting really sick of the “hurr hurr ads bad only idiots don’t use adblockers” circlejerk on here. I pay $8 for YT Premium which seems super fair for the 10-15 hours of content I get on there a week. I like supporting creators, a lot of which rely on ad revenue to continue making their channels.
For the rest of you that thinks you have the moral high ground from blocking ads, what do you think the solution is? Subscriptions don’t work, paywalls are easily bypassed, and more reasonable ads don’t generate enough revenue to keep sites in business. Content shouldn’t just be free, people deserve to be paid for their work.
Should the free internet just die and become a series of subscription silos? It seems to be going that way, and more ad blocking will just accelerate that more.
Using adblockers and paying to use YT premium aren't inherently seperate, if you feel that's a fair price and are willing to pay that (like I am) no one should call you stupid for it. But people feel that isn't a fair price (which is also fair considering the amounter of users, $1 per month per user would bring in $2bn per month for YouTube afaik).
My big issue with paying for an ad free experience is that there are ads on videos of stolen content, and that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. I have this issue with SoundCloud as well. Random people will upload mixtapes of other artists that were originally released for free, but SoundCloud will run ads over it. It's obvious the creators aren't getting paid. I don't understand how that's even legal. Even if you argue that the service of using the website shouldn't be completely free, they are profiting off of stolen content.
Little confused by this one, but yeah. I can't afford subscriptions, and I also can't afford the products and services the ads are for. Ads are just pollution in my consciousness, so why should I reduce my QoL for no benefit to anyone? If a creator says that if you use adblock, don't watch me, I won't. Site blocks adblockers, I don't use it. What else am I supposed to do, when I make less than a living and don't really have better options?
I don't think I could use the internet if I didn't have an adblocker. Ads genuinely anger me. I think it's just from the early days with pop-overs and unders, blinking, non-collapsible and the like holding content hostage. Intrusive or not, I'll do everything I can to not see an ad.
I use Mullvad so naturally, I can pick my exit country. Since I'm an iOS user (aka, no NewPipe etc) I always choose an exit country that is majority non-English-speaking. It makes the YT app adds so much more bearable if I can't understand what they're saying.
Just trying to read the news on my phone kills its battery because of all the ads and crap. I'm just reading, why is my phone's battery draining like water? Hence Ad blocker is mandatory.
